W205 Genomics-assisted breeding for cool season food legumes: from gene discovery to application

Date: Saturday, January 14, 2012
Time: 2:50 PM
Room: Pacific Salon 6-7 (2nd Floor)
Rebecca McGee , USDA-ARS, Pullman, WA
Chun-Huai Cheng , Washington State University, Pullman, WA
Keithanne Mockaitis , Indiana University Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Bloomington, IN
Clarice J. Coyne , USDA-ARS/Washington State University, Pullman, WA
Sook Jung , Washington State University
Ping Zheng , Washington State University
Gail Timmerman-Vaughan , New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Canterbury Agriculture & Science Centre, Lincoln, New Zealand
Eliane Thaines Bodah , Washington State University, Pullman, WA
Michael A. Grusak , USDA/ARS, Houston, TX
Jinguo Hu , USDA- ARS, Pullman, WA
George J. Vandemark , USDA-ARS - Washington State University, Pullman, WA
Weidong Chen , ARS-USDA, Pullman, WA
Kevin McPhee , North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND
Norman Weeden , Montana State University, Bozeman, MT
Lyndon Porter , USDA-ARS, Prosser, WA
Dorrie Main , Washington State University
Pisum sativum has been a long-used model plant in genetics and plant physiology.  Unfortunately, the genome of pea is in excess of 4.5 Gbp and was pushed aside for more pliant species in the early to mid-molecular biology revolution.  However, the advent of massively parallel sequencing techniques has leveled the genomic-tool development playing ground and we used the next generation sequencing technology to develop a public pea transcriptome resource and database for comparative genomics with the sequenced legumes species. Using RNA pools representing seven tissue types from pea cv ‘Aragorn’, we produced 3.084 million high quality reads, which averaged 1044 bp in length after cleaning.  Assembly of the cleaned reads with NEWBLER and MIRA resulted in 37455 unigenes of which approximately 80% had homology to previously identified proteins in the TAIR, TrEMBL and Swiss-Prot databases.  We developed a web-enabled database, populated with relevant data to serve as a portal for breeders to browse and query data regarding traits, trait heritability and genotypes. The database is being developed to serve as a resource to facilitate cool season food legume plant breeding and research by providing centralized, integrated access to genetic and genomic information.  The database can be accessed at www.coolseasonfoodlegume.org .